As the competitive landscape continues to develop, these are exciting times for object storage, and particularly for Hitachi Content Platform (HCP). The breadth of use cases and range of storage options available today is expansive. Consumers have their choice of offerings from enterprise storage vendors, open source software developers, and niche players – all of whom are looking to capitalize on the object storage buzz.

Gartner’s Critical Capabilities Report for Object Storage evaluates object storage products against eight critical capabilities and five use cases. Of the 13 considered, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) scored in the top three products for all use cases. HCP also scored in the top two products for five critical capabilities.

Gartner’s report points to cost reduction being a driving factor in enterprise interest in object storage, along with compelling hybrid cloud capabilities. Supporting this statement were a number of key findings:

The price range for object storage platforms is wide

Hybrid cloud storage is in a renaissance period

Analytics workloads are a large driver of data growth to public cloud object storage services

There is a continued requirement among enterprises for file protocols

Many object storage vendors claim S3 API compatibility

Key Topics

Gartner’s analysis of HCP covers a number of important traits and topics. The information below provides additional product details.

Metadata Storage

HCP combines a robust metadata architecture coupled with intelligent policy based management. HCP based solutions treat file data, file metadata and custom metadata as a single object that is tracked and stored among a variety of storage tiers. HCP also allows custom metadata and the ability to store multiple annotations of that metadata for more advanced data management and analytics.

Protocol Support

HCP supports multiple protocols, including NFSv4, CIFS (SMB 3.1.1), SMTP, WebDAV, HTTP/REST and S3. Data ingested via any one protocol is fully accessible by every other protocol, with directories and filenames intact.

Hybrid/Multicloud Support

HCP supports simultaneous tiering to, from and between multiple leading public cloud vendors, including Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Microsoft Azure, or any S3 enabled cloud.

Customer Support

We take any customer support issue very seriously with the goal of fast, efficient and accurate resolution. With the largest customer base of any actively sold object storage solution, we provide our customers with expertise gained in some of the most complex and challenging customer environments around the globe. Maintaining consistently high standards in customer satisfaction is our top priority.

Deployment Options

Current deployment options include software defined (VM or KVM), fully-integrated appliance, delivery by service provider partners. Additionally, HCP is available as either a managed or hosted cloud service through our Cloud Service Provider partner program. HCP also provides the ability to run on commodity off the shelf hardware. Enabling HCP to run on bare metal is a development priority.

Management Interface

HCP supports a variety of consistent monitoring and diagnostic solutions that enable easy integration into any enterprise environment. For example, HCP provides Call Home features and chargeback reporting. Reporting can be gathered for individual namespaces, a tenant rollup of namespaces, and for the system as a whole. These reports can be collected from the Management Console or via API. Dashboards leverage a number of software integration points to monitor SNMP, Syslog, Status API, SAR logs, and Admin/Tenant administration monitoring screens. A redesigned, unified and versatile management interface is among our key development priorities.

Summary

We believe Gartner’s findings in the Critical Capabilities Report align with HCP customer priorities, which were a key consideration heading into our June 2017 HCP portfolio launch. That launch addressed the challenges faced by customers who are on the road to digital transformation and looking to enable accelerated productivity, cost reduction, and data mobilization. New innovations that were introduced allowed the HCP portfolio to achieve over 60% TCO savings versus public cloud.

We attribute our HCP portfolio as the key to our success across more than ten years. The portfolio is the only organically developed solution set in the industry that lets you build your own secure cloud storage or large-scale repository using HCP object storage, and an on-premises enterprise mobility solution with HCP Anywhere, and a Cloud or File gateway using Hitachi Data Ingestor, and a big data search and analytics solution using Hitachi Content Intelligence.

The numbers speak for themselves:

2,000+ customers and growing, with over $1B in revenue generated

4 of 5 of the largest banks in the world use HCP

4 o 5 of the largest insurance organizations in the United States use HCP